Winning a fight for your life and surviving depends on both psychological preparedness and well-practiced fighting skills. In this chapter, I shall focus on four key elements of psychological preparedness: situational awareness, positive self-talk, fear control, and mental rehearsal.
When you are psychologically prepared for survival, you are tuned into reality. In the real world, unawareness of an imminent threat, lack of preparedness to effectively deal with it, or denial of its presence mean not surviving. History often provides memorable lessons. For example, Wild Bill Hickok certainly knew how to fight. Yet, he was shot in the back of the head and murdered during a moment of unawareness, while playing a poker game. He had let his guard down.
Good guys and gals like us normally don’t go out looking for a fight. That means we have to be psychologically and physically prepared for worst-case scenarios, and that attitude should be taken just as seriously by the non-sworn law abiding armed citizen as it is by any sworn law enforcement officer.
In an emergency, I’ll call 9-1-1 just as fast as I can — after I’ve dealt with any immediate threat. The fact is the police (God bless them) cannot be counted on to get there on time to save you if you are attacked. We must all must be prepared to deal with a criminal aggressor before the cavalry arrives.
Many years ago, the brother of a friend of mine was murdered in a home invasion. In more recent years, a physician in my neighborhood was similarly done in. Despite my rage at these tragic events, I am ashamed to admit that there had always been a part of me that felt that if my “moment of truth” ever came, I’d turn yellow! Then came September 11, 2001, and my outlook underwent major changes.
The events of 9/11 were our nation’s wake-up call. Today, we are better prepared to preempt and defend against an attack on our borders. Truly, to my post-9/11 way of thinking, every law-abiding citizen has a stake in maintaining our “homeland security” and a responsibility to do their part. That means being psychologically prepared to use lethal force in defense of one’s own life and limb.
Just so you know, I have never served in the military, I’m not a cop, and I have never been in a gunfight. However, given my professional background as a clinical psychologist, and my personal background as the son of a Holocaust survivor, the psychological keys to combat survival are of special interest to me.
Disarmed citizens are at the mercy of violent criminals and tyrannical governments. However, having a weapon will do you little good if you are caught unaware and do not have the chance to employ it (like poor Wild Bill Hickok). Worse yet, if you are unaware, and/or untrained in weapon retention techniques, your weapon can be taken away from you and used against you (one of the arguments employed by the anti-gun rights/pro-gun control crowd). So, the first step in survival is situational awareness.
“Situational awareness” means being your own bodyguard. I like to use Colonel Jeff Cooper’s color codes for training on this topic. Cooper’s color codes are a continuum that ranges from “Condition White” (completely tuned out and unaware) to “Condition Black” (you’re in a fight for your life). It is important to point out that the rationale for the continuum is that you cannot shift directly and abruptly from “Condition White” into “Condition Black.” Just as you cannot shift from reverse into drive in your car without first going through neutral, you must go through the intermediary states of awareness and readiness. Let’s examine each more closely.
“Condition White” is never appropriate when you are outside the safe confines of your castle, and, even then, it may only be wise to settle into this level of unawareness for brief periods. (Certainly when you are in a deep sleep, you’re in White.) So, you’d better have reliable door and window locks and a good alarm system.
Next up is “Condition Yellow.” This is the level we should train ourselves to be in most of the time. “Condition Yellow” does not mean being paranoid. It means remaining alert and aware of what is going on around us.
Going into “Condition Orange” means there’s something that feels not quite right. You’ve turned up the flame on the burner and are ready if the situation escalates into a real and imminent threat.
In “Condition Red,” you are prepared for a fight. You expect there’s going to be a fight, but you are not fighting just yet. All conditions spell “GO!” yet you remain cool because you are analyzing your tactical options — If he does that, then, I’ll do this. You are readying yourself to prevail and survive, and you are confident that you will retain the upper hand.
“Condition Black” is the last stage. You are in the fight. If you have prepared up to this point, you’re ahead of the game. You are employing every advantage at your disposal, and because street fights and gun fights are ugly and unfair, you do not give your attacker any benefit of the doubt or any chance to kill you. You fight dirty and cheat to live another day.
Self-talk is the voice we have in our head that tells us what’s going to happen, and the next thing, and the next. Noted psychologist Albert Ellis has written that we are all born with a biological predisposition to think negatively, pessimistically, and irrationally. If that’s true, and I think it is, then we have to work at countering this. The bottom line is that, if you think you’re going to lose a fight, then you probably will. But it works the other way, too. Assuming you have the requisite physical skills and training, if you think you’re going to win a fight, you have a much better chance of doing just that.
It is a good idea to become more aware of your inner self-talk, or inner voice. First, practice asking yourself, What am I feeling right now? Scared? Sad? Mad? Glad? Once you become familiar with identifying your emotional states or feelings, practice asking yourself, When I feel this way, what am I telling myself? By doing this, you will become familiar with the types of repetitive thoughts and mental images or pictures your mind generates in response to different situations.
If your inner self-talk is negative and self-defeating, it is necessary to practice countering it with positive (but realistic) self-talk. For example, replace I can’t learn to do this with I can learn to do this, and I will learn it. Replace, too, negative mental images with those that program your subconscious mind for mastery, victory, and survival. For example, if you see or imagine yourself looking like an easy mark to a couple of punks, practice imagining yourself displaying a more confident and self-reliant demeanor.
Author and security consultant Gavin de Becker wrote a book called The Gift of Fear. What he was trying to get at with the title is that fear is a feeling that should be acknowledged and then responded to, as a signal that there may be a problem that needs to be dealt with. Fear must be heeded for the information it can provide. It is your body’s and mind’s automatic responses to a perceived threat, a signal it’s time to move from “Condition Yellow” to “Condition Orange” and as far along the color continuum as the situation dictates.
When we are confronted with a threat to our survival, our bodies automatically prepare for fight or flight. The perceived threat triggers what Massad Ayoob, the developer of the Stressfire defensive shooting system, has clearly explained as a physiological “Body Alarm Reaction,” or BAR. When the BAR is triggered, there’s a massive adrenaline dump into the bloodstream. This stimulant hormone causes our heart to race, our blood pressure to rise, our muscles to tense, our visual and auditory focus to narrow, our visual and auditory acuity to increase, and our breathing to quicken and become shallow. If we are trained to fight, and there is no opportunity to preclude the fight, our body is physiologically prepared to do so reflexively. If we perceive an opportunity to flee and avoid the fight, our body is prepped to do that, also. So, the BAR is adaptive, at least to a point.